Pension fund fee studies are among the most useful documents in institutional investing. They are also among the most misread. Every major public pension publishes one. Most are available online, attached to CAFR filings or buried in board meeting minutes portals. And most of the people who would benefit most from reading them carefully never do.
That is a mistake. Fee studies contain real intelligence: what managers are being paid, how relationships are structured, and how a fund's cost profile compares to peers. But extracting that intelligence requires knowing how the documents are built and where they tend to mislead.
Here is what to watch for.
Finding the Document
Start with the pension fund's website. Fee studies are typically published as supplements to the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, or embedded in board meeting materials. Larger funds often have a dedicated investment section on their site with fee schedules, consultant reports, and manager rosters going back several years.
For funds that do not publish fee data directly, a public records or FOIA request is usually effective. Expect response timelines of 30 to 90 days. Some states exempt certain fee data from disclosure entirely, particularly performance fees paid to private fund managers. That exemption is worth noting: the funds where fee data is hardest to obtain are often the ones with the most complex and costly manager relationships.
Four Problems That Appear in Almost Every Fee Study
Once you have the document, the real work begins. Fee studies are not standardized across funds. Each uses its own reporting format, its own definitions, and its own fiscal calendar. Before drawing any conclusions, you need to account for four issues that appear consistently across public pension fee reporting.
1. Dollar Figures Without Rates
Most fee studies report total dollars paid to each manager, not basis points. A $10M fee line tells you almost nothing on its own. That same $10M figure represents 200 basis points on a $500M mandate and 20 basis points on a $5B mandate. Those are not comparable. One may reflect a standard institutional fee. The other is expensive by any measure.
The mandate size you need to make the conversion is usually in the document, but rarely on the same page as the fee figure. It may be in the investment section of the CAFR, in a separate manager roster, or in a consultant report appended to the board materials. Cross-referencing across sections is standard. Do the conversion before treating any fee figure as meaningful.
2. Gross vs. Net Reporting
Some pension funds subtract manager expenses directly from investment income and report only the net figure. Others report gross returns and list fees as a separate line item. Both approaches describe the same real-world cost. The fund paid the same amount either way. But they look completely different on paper.
A fund using net reporting will appear cheaper than a peer using gross reporting even if every underlying manager contract is identical. If you are trying to compare fee levels across two funds, the first question is always: are these figures calculated the same way? If the answer is no, you are not comparing costs. You are comparing accounting conventions.
3. Performance Fee Timing
Performance fees do not appear in fee studies the way management fees do. A manager with a 20% carried interest will show zero performance fees in a down year and potentially several million dollars in a strong one. Neither number tells you what the relationship costs over time.
Single-year performance fee data is not useful for benchmarking. A fund that looks expensive in year three of a private equity cycle may be getting exactly what it paid for. A fund that looks cheap may simply be in a down cycle. Multi-year averages, ideally across a full market cycle, are the only figures worth comparing. Most fee studies do not present them that way, which means the normalization has to happen on the reader's side.
4. Reporting Lags
A fee study published in 2025 almost certainly covers the prior fiscal year. Depending on the fund's calendar, that means activity through June or December 2024. If you are trying to understand a fund's current manager relationships or recent changes in fee structure, you may be looking at data that is 12 to 18 months old by the time it reaches you.
The lag matters more in some contexts than others. For stable, long-tenured manager relationships, a year-old fee figure is probably still directionally accurate. For funds that have been actively restructuring their rosters, the document you have may not reflect what the fund actually looks like today.
What This Means for Interpretation
Each of these issues is manageable individually. Together, they make cross-fund fee comparison genuinely difficult. A fund that appears cost-efficient in raw fee study data may be reporting net of expenses while its peers report gross. A manager relationship that looks expensive in one year may have generated strong performance fees because it outperformed. A figure that seems current may cover a fiscal period that ended 18 months ago.
None of this makes the data less valuable. It means the data rewards careful reading, and it means that aggregated, normalized fee data is worth far more than any single fee study read in isolation.
Where Dakota Comes In
Dakota's Fee Studies product does the normalization work at scale. It aggregates public fee study data across hundreds of public pension funds, converts dollar figures to basis points using mandate sizes, accounts for gross versus net reporting differences, and presents multi-year performance fee averages rather than single-year snapshots.
The result is fee benchmarking that is actually comparable: not stacked raw numbers that look like comparisons but aren't, but standardized figures that let fund managers understand where their fees sit relative to peers in the same asset class, mandate size range, and fund type.
If you are using fee studies as one-off documents read in isolation, you are getting a fraction of the available intelligence. The full picture requires putting each fund's data in context, and that requires the kind of aggregation no single fee study can provide.
To see how Dakota Marketplace tracks fee study data book a demo here.
